Nevertheless, another update...and I wish I had something to show. I had some bad luck with the INI File, and it's looking like it's falling apart steadily. Specifically, my own stupid fault - I tried narrowing the Tech Levels from 10 to 4, since a lot of the Tech Levels seem redundant. Apparently, YR does not agree with my opinion.
Also, there appears to be a lack of resources for YR. Two Voxols I've been after - a proper Sheridan Tank and a Avro Vulcan - don't seem to exist anymore (or never have in the case of the Sheridan). Some of the factions as well look to be beyond the tools I have - one of which we'll discuss below. For today's spotlight, the Allied FutureTech Battalion.
The FutureTech Battalions are the luckiest Allied Men and Women - these are the divisions equipped with various new toys that are out of prototype and into the more experimental stage, and at varying degrees of quality, from almost ready to mass produce to hard to replace works.
The FutureTech Battalion's exact specialty varies, depending on the tree picked. Instead of a normal Tier 2/Tier 3 tech up, they have the usual Tier 1 Tech and then can choose one (and only one) of the following trees -
Energy - A Glass Cannon, Offence oriented tree. Contains Prism Tanks, Ion Tractors and the Thor Experimental Siege weapon.
Mirage - A stealth and trickery oriented tree. Contains Mirage Tanks, Camouflage Drones and Phantom Snipers.
Chrono - A tree that focuses on disruption and teleportation, as well as reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. Contains Chrono Legionnares, Chrono Tanks and the Immobiliser Experimental Base Defence.
Robotics - Robotic units are the strongest units the Allies will have access to, being immune to a variety of effects, but also share one crippling weakness - all the robots are slaved to the same building. When it goes, all your Robots deactivate.
Note that the example units above may not end up in said trees, and may end up being cut altogether (and for those people already thinking I won't cut the Prism Tank OR the Mirage Tank - I've already cut the Battle Fortress - I'm not afraid of cutting a "canon" unit or fan favorite!).
At any rate, the exact manner hasn't been settled on. As individual buildings, they'd need some kind of scripting to prevent the player building all of the Tech Trees...which may crash YR if it was implimented. I did find a tutorial on Building Plugins, but there was a small print that made that moot:
Upgrades can not give the player ability to build new unit(s). If you attempt to do so, each building built after the plugin causes the new unit(s) to dissapear from the sidebar, making them unbuildable again.
Simply put, unless Ares has fixed that, that throws that idea out of the window. So how this mechanic is going to be implimented I have no idea. Buuut on the happier news, I can show you the first of the new FutureTech Battalion units.
The little Mecha in the picture your seeing there is the Enforcer Battlesuit - it's a redited version of a SHP IceDragon200 made a while back, originally for Tiberian Sun. The original topic is here, I just downloaded it, converted it to be RA2/YR and re-palleted it to Allied Scheme. And no, this actually looks about the right scale - it's supposed to be between 8 or 9 feet tall, so it scales nicely with the tanks.
While I'm crediting, those are Azari Apoc's Allied Medium Battle Tanks from his first ever Voxol Pack, and TX1138's Tank Destroyer respectively.
Anyways, the Enforcer is unlocked though the Energy Tree. The Enforcer is a bipedal, 8 to 9 foot tall Battlesuit designed as a new wave of Allied Heavy Infantry. In gameplay terms, it's an Infantryman built at the War Factory (for reasons relating to the SHP more than anything else). It's armed with a Laser Cutter - a laser with a fare range and fast rate of fire, allowing it to slice open tanks easily, and with it's plate armour it's virtually proof from the worst AT weapons most mainline tanks carry. However, the Enforcer is very much an infantryman still - it's vulnerable to Anti Infantry weapons, and it's laser cannot hit Aircraft, nor is it very effective against infantry. While a pack can slice though a handful of Apocalypse Tanks, a wave of Tesla Troopers or even Conscripts can easily whittle them down with virtually no loss of life.
And that's your update. My apologies for it not being much, but we've had a large number of setbacks. I also have the feeling there's no interest, given I'd imagine the FAQ update would have gathered (at the very least) some hate mail over me choosing to ignore Yuri for the time being.
Ah well, until next time.
Quick Edit - Becuase I forgot, the IFV at the back was made by a chap named Melle. It came with the download I got for Daz, and just looked better.